The Two Stages of Guilt- Killerverse
by EvilPieIsGood
Summary: 1.) The Loving Husband. 2.) The Lonely Child (A SH2 serial killer AU)
1. In Water

When he was younger, James never really knew what was in those strange trash bags his dad would take out to the dump. He always wanted to go with him, but learned not to ask after the 4th time.

(Turns out that 'Daddy' had quite the temper.)

So he'd tried to ignore every time his father would leave, 4 or 5 large bags of foul smelling trash in the back of the truck, until he walked in on him.

He was 15 then, and it had been years since he'd mentioned or asked about the bags, and all he'd wanted was to get a school permission slip signed.

There had been blood…there had been blood everywhere in the room James had always assumed was his fathers, blood and hunks of hair and scraps of cloth all over the place, and his father was shoving what looked like fingers and internal organs into a big trash bag.

"What are you doing in here, James?" his father had roared at him, and James found it hard to reply. There was…something about the colours, the smell, that didn't frighten him. He'd simply waved the permission form, before going out to sit at the kitchen table.

When his father joined him, he had different clothing on, a different face, and a pen. As he signed the paper for James, he explained.

"They were late with their rent."

"She'd just had a baby, and left it up in the room."

"They were just going to leave."

For each explanation, James would nod, able to understand exactly. After his mother had run off on his father, James knew that his father needed to do everything to keep the both of them afloat.

He stayed quiet for a moment, before asking "Can I help next time, Dad?"

* * *

><p>He'd been helping his father with the disposal for several years when he first met Mary Shepherd. He'd been passing through Shepherd's Glen at the same time as their annual fair when they met. She'd been sickingly sweet, covered in cotton candy strings, but when she offered him a bit of the spun sugar, free because she was having suck a hard time with the machine, he fell.<p>

He'd claimed her name, her phone number, her heart, and eventually her life.

* * *

><p>She had been sick, so, so sick, and it was growing harder and harder for him to hold them both afloat. There where bills, expenses, and his father had left the duty of cleaning up unsuitable tenants to him. The ones that where alone, had no one to rely on, had no one to miss them where his favourite, because he could take his time, imagine it was her under the knife, in the plastic bag.<p>

But when it came too it, he was too cowardly. He loved her still, and even though she was dragging him down, killing him as well, he couldn't even think of hurting her that way.

So it was no surprise that he'd forgotten what he'd done, when they traveled to the town they both loved. Their first date, taken the very day they met, had been to the lake, the park, where she would stand against the railing and tell him about all the people who died deep beneath the waters.

Only with what he perceived as a letter to guide him, he met a girl with a knife, a boy with a gun, a child unaffected by the horrors around her, and Maria.

She looked like Mary, sounded like Mary, but when James looked at her, all he saw was a fake, someone he could put under the knife. Like he never could with Mary. He had waited for her to say something about the lake, the dead under it, but nothing.

She was nothing like Mary.

But still he found himself confusing them, found himself calling Mary's name instead of Maria's, remembering her as his wife. He would admit that they were a little similar, but the double didn't have the same flare for the morbid that Mary used to, didn't know the same details about the town that Mary had.

Maria had been uneasy and refused to enter the bowling alley.

Mary would have followed after, eagerly detailing the murders that had occurred there years before.

She had tried to appeal to his…basic need, but he didn't care. What should he? She wasn't Mary, wasn't the woman he'd hoped to grow old with.

Even so, when the Pyramid thing got her the first time, he was upset. The second time, blasé, and the third? The third time he was angry. Angry and upset that he wasn't going to get to take care of her like his father had taken care of some many, like he had taken care of so many.

So instead, he stood up, faced the Pyramid things, made amends, and destroyed Maria.

But not Mary. No, never her.

He loved her so much, and he'd let her down in the end.

* * *

><p><em>The car took in so much water, so fast, he was surprised it took him so long to black out.<em>

* * *

><p>AN: The next Killerverse fic- In which James kills people! Woooo


	2. In Fire

It had been an accident.

Laura had known she wasn't supposed to be playing with the lighters, but her brother had so many of them, had left them out, and she just wanted to find the one with the funny coloured flame.

He had brought it back from Greece, and only showed it to her once before calling her a 'baby' and putting it away with the others.

It had been late, her parents gone to bed angry but not bitter, her brother in his room not yet asleep but on the edge of it, and Laura had gotten up to look at lighter in the dark.

She couldn't get the first few to light, and she'd put them down, disappointed. What if none of them would light? She wondered, but did not say out loud. It was a school night and she was sure to be in heaps of trouble if she was found awake.

The next couple also failed to produce a flame, and she decided to try one last one before going to bed.

If she had stopped then and there, her story would have a different ending, one with a puppy on her birthday and a proud older brother when she fought back against her bullies and her first boyfriend in high school. If she'd just stopped, or even not tried at all, she would have been happy.

But this one lights, the flame large and bright and it scares her.

Laura drops it.

* * *

><p>An accident, it's labeled.<p>

The lighters where improperly stored, there were too many of them, there were no smoke alarms, and they'd all been asleep. Well, almost all of them.

Laura lies for the first time, and says she woke up when the smoke had entered her room.

(She'd run there, scared, after the fire first started, sure that her father or brother or even her mother would spring out of bed to stop it.)

Laura lies for the second time, and says she tried to wake up her parents, tried to get to her brother, before running out the back door for help.

(She was so scared, and she ran right away, right past their rooms, when no one came out to investigate the smell.)

They say her survival is a miracle, especially when the fire took her family, and the family next door.

Laura only feels guilt…but not enough to tell someone what really happened to her, to her family.

She ends up bouncing around from hospital to hospital, first for minor smoke inhalation, then for her nightmares, the screaming that would scare nurses half to death and would have her sent to talk with a man or woman about what happened that night.

Finally she is sent to some hospital in some city that she doesn't bother learning the name for. She's going to be shuttled off somewhere else for sleep tests and medications to get her and everyone else on her floor through the night.

It's there she meets Mary.

Laura was walking around, like she shouldn't have been, when she stumbled into Mary's room, looking for…well… anything but her room, her bed.

The first thing she notices are the flowers that are everywhere, the second is the woman calling out to her. She panics a little, tries to leave the room, but then the woman starts to climb out of her bed, and almost falls.

Then Laura is there, helping the woman back into bed, then Laura's sitting on the bed, and before long she's being woken up by a nurse the next morning for falling asleep on it.

She doesn't have any nightmares.

Soon it's her and Mary, Laura always visiting, always there with the sickly woman. Well, almost always there. Whenever her husband James is there, Laura conveniently has a meeting with a perspective family to adopt her.

She doesn't want Mr and Mrs Nobody to take her to some place with a picket fence and flammable walls though. She wants to stay with Mary, and sabotages herself.

But then Mary is well enough to go home, or that is what they say to Laura when she arrives one morning to talk to her. Mary's things are gone, the bed is stripped, and Laura is barely able to see her getting into a car outside.

Laura hates the hospital now, and dutifully grabs what little she has, steals a letter that she saw Mary give to a nurse one day when she though Laura wasn't looking, and she runs.

The town is cold and foggy, and she is sure someone will be sent after her. But, after a day, nothing. A week, nothing. She's been forgotten, or so she thinks. Once she goes into a store because she has nothing else to eat, she sees that there's no one there. A house she enters is completely empty.

She's alone.

But, after another week, she meets this guy, Eddie. He's horrible, smells like rotting food, and Laura runs off soon after meeting him. Some weird lady, looking for her mother. Laura simply shrugs and edges away when she sees something glinting.

And James, Mary's husband.

She dogs him, angry that he took Mary away from her, from the hospital, and taunts him by waving the letter from Mary in front of his face. She doesn't really hate him though, so when he tells her what he did, in the weird, smokey smelling hotel, Laura can't believe him.

But she can, in a way. Because she did the same thing when she ran away, when she dropped that lighter and didn't tell her parents.

In the end, he takes her to the edge of town, where he left his car. He gives her his wallet, everything inside of it. He points her towards a town called Brahams, and tells her to call someone named 'Frank."

Then he gets in his car, and slowly takes it down the winding path to the lake.

* * *

><p>She can hear the splash, the gurgle of the lake as she walks, tears spilling over and running down her face as she thinks of the parents she killed and the killer who could have been her father.<p>

* * *

><p><em>She wouldn't have blamed him, not if she'd had the chance to tell him what she'd done.<em>

* * *

><p>AN: Annnnnd Laura. Not...really a serial killer but did accidentally kill some folks.

(For various reasons, I decided not to touch on Eddie, Maria, and Angela)

I hope you enjoyed this thing! haha~


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